Spilling the beans
In which I finally do some work on the farm and Farmer Joe speaks out (sort of)
I was a child in the nineties and almost every meal I ate consisted of chicken nuggets/fish fingers, chips, beans, and sliced tomato and cucumber (often dipped in ketchup. Have you tried this? Way better than houmous).
This is said with absolutely no shade towards my wonderful parents. Now that I am a parent myself, I wonder almost daily how I can be expected to provide yet another nutritious meal for my children, which more often than not, they do not eat. Five fruit and veg? Iron? Protein? Three times a day? Can’t we just eat toast? When I lived on my own, all I ate was different things on toast and, when I was feeling fancy, the meal outlined above. It was great.
Anyway, my childhood diet did not give me massive exposure to a wide variety of vegetables. In fact, when I worked part-time in Asda as a teenager, my nightmare was people bringing unlabelled vegetables through the tills. I would scrabble through the paper trying to find the right code to put into the till at the same time as trying to figure out exactly what I was holding in my hand. I remember clutching a vegetable that looked particularly exotic and almost tearfully asking the customer what it was. They raised their eyebrows. ‘That’s a leek, love.’
This week, at nearly 40 years of age, I have discovered green beans. I mean, I did already know about green beans. I’ve been serving them to my kids for ages. It’s so easy to open the can and whack them into a pan. They love them and they pair perfectly with fish fingers. But this week I discovered real, fresh green beans, and now I am obsessed.
In keeping with my promise to do more at the farm, I wheeled the baby out in the pram a few mornings ago, and asked Farmer Joe to put me to work. ‘You could harvest the beans,’ he said, handing me a basket.
‘Easy,’ I replied. ‘Give me two baskets. I’ll fill them both.’
‘You’ve only got twenty minutes. Why don’t you just start with one?’
No problem, thought I. In twenty minutes, that red basket would be overflowing with precious green beans. I placed myself into a crouch position, the baby stationed nearby to watch his mother hard at work. I stayed in that position for approximately two minutes before needing to stand. Oof, clearly I needed to do more squats. Never mind, down I went for another two minutes to search for good-sized beans at the same time as not breaking the plant. The crouching got old fast and I started bending from the waist, finally understanding why Farmer Joe is always complaining about back pain.
Reader, in twenty minutes, I managed to fill two-thirds of one basket, and I was spent. Massive respect to all people who harvest vegetables for a living. They are hard as nails.
My little basket was sold almost immediately and we harvested a load more for lunch. My mother-in-law steamed them for a while then put them in a pan with olive oil, garlic, salt and pepper. They were unbelievably delicious. I can’t be sure, but I think the baby ate about twenty-five.
So, I get it now. Beans are the best. And these ones tasted even better because I helped to get them from plant to plate. Yum! Maybe I should help out more often.
Below the paywall, Farmer Joe gave me his top tips about growing green beans. At first, he said, ‘Put them in soil and water them’, but with a bit of gentle pressure (twenty seconds under the force of my death stare), it turns out that he actually knows quite a lot about how to get them to thrive. Thank you so much for reading. If you’d like to upgrade your subscription and get access to more incredibly useful information, or if you’d like to buy me a cheeky cuppa, the buttons are below.
